Mushin-Sho

Sometime last semester I saw the flyer for a talk by Charles Johnson. I had never heard of him, despite being quite famous as a prominent African-American writer (Middle Passage probably being his most famous work). However, two points caught my attention; 1) Winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the genius award 2) Practicing Buddhist (and later, practicing martial artist). WORD! Gotta see this.

I placed myself in the front row. Allow me two clichés if you will: There was a great sense of familiarity when I first saw him, almost like looking into an aged mirror that shows a possible future version of you. There was also, and I lived on this for a few days, a prolonged eye contact between us that bespoke a similar recognition on his part. Close clichés. Of course, I had to ask a question so that my presence couldn’t be missed and to give me something from which to launch a conversation from.

“Sir, how do you negotiate the connections between Oneness and Marxism?”
“Oneness and Marxism?”
“Absolutely!” Unwilling to say anymore, lest I narrow my question and make it answerable rather than discussable.
“Hmm…that would be an interesting interface….let’s talk after.”

More cliché. Inside, I’m jumping up and down, doing a jig, while shaking God’s hand for a moment as I elevate on the emotional spike. End cliché. I got his card and emailed him a few days later.

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Still not done with her essay for a variety of reasons…

...get off my case…you ain’t my director…

Jameson opens his book The Political Unconscious with what he belives to be one point that his work’s methodology reinforces:

“Always historicize”

Spivak seems to add: “Never unify”

more later…

For those who come to this space for things intelligent and cool can skip this post. The blog posts — as required by my six week initiative — must continue; however, the moment finds me in a less than ideal emotional moment, which, to repeat my warning, will find some expression here.

i.e. I’m fucked up and I’m going to write about it…

…or rather how I’m dealing with it.

So, to keep things from getting too personal, lets just describe the present moment as painful; I will not disclose all the forces that go to create the moment. Rather, I want to share something that I heard today that was both insightful and exhausting. The latter phenomenon stems from the former.

Pain, I heard, is not an exterior force imposing its will in order to throw us off our baseline, whatever that may be. Rather, it is a kind of internal messenger that attempts to foreground the contradictions already present in the baseline. This insight would apply, especially aptly, to those kinds of intimate pain that we don’t necessarily consider exterior; depression and chronic exhaustion come to mind first. As far I understand at the moment, internal pain that seems to be caused by external forces — heartbreak, overwork etc., — is in fact not; pain here is an internal experience, certainly, but one whose cause is also internal. So what then is the cause?

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...I can’t upload another image without making the page annoyingly, sluggishly large.

I offer you, instead, a link to an amazing shot: be sure to click the thumbnail for a full enlargement.

Half of Siqueiros’ 11,000 photographs are avialable here: Wow

...pics up…

An interesting concept that is beautifully executed

...”An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life,” a group show that opens at the Redcat gallery in Los Angeles on Thursday. For the exhibition, 17 artists were asked to respond to Siqueiros’s photographic archive, some 11,000 pictures that served as source material for his murals or as documentation of his finished artwork.

The only way to understand why I would spend a Saturday night sitting at my parents house with my laptop, a hockey game, and Spivak’s famous essay is to examine the historical specificity of the life-moment. Many have theorized this condition as “grad student life” but those are the very theorists that Spivak bowls over in, what the New Yorker could call, an intellectual tour-de-force.

I have been trying to pay special attention to the methodologies, heuristics, and the stakes/ interventions within texts. Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is impressive in all these regards. My aim is not to summarize or counter her claims, mainly because I have yet to finish her essay (good game on), but just to give (myself) some sense of her trajectory.

Without modesty she begins by taking on Foucault and Deleuze, questioning their unawareness of their work’s “material production in institutionality.” More specifically, or perhaps more broadly, Spivak moves to question the “S/subject”in their work through the notion of desire; she argues that “in the name of desire, they reintroduce the undivided subject into the discourse of power.” To approach the problem, Spivak (thus far) moves to interrogate two distinct but often concomitant terms: vertreten, representation in political and state terms, and darstellen, re-present. The terms provide, while themselves being pressured, a broad schematic for an exploration of colonialist rhetoric and its specific attempts to create/alter/ form S/subjects. The final turn in this breathless text is to the gendered colonial subject, who at the last moment of my reading, is the ghost in an abyss.

The goal is to finish the text tomorrow and give a fuller, or rather a more specific account.

Enough trying to figure this out…I’m off to watch the national sport of another of her majesty’s colonies.

There was a job talk today from Jeff Pruchnic who is applying for a position in Rhetoric/ Composition but more specifically the “computers and writing” sector of this field. The talk itself was nothing exceptional but there were some interesting “professionalization moments” that concerned me.

First, and most superficially, he was wearing a black pin stripe suit with brown shoes and cream socks: WTF??

Now then; it was interesting to note other features of his physical presentation that, to me, played a lot of different angles simultaneously. Pruchnic had thick black hair, the majority of which, except for the sides, was prominently spiked up; his facial hair was deliberately unshaven in strategic locations; thin rimmed black glasses rested on the precipice of his face which, quite nicely, always wore a slight smile even when under faculty interrogation.

I begin with Pruchnic’s physical appearance because there are so many intersections and disconnections with my own wardrobe project. Where I choose to be cleaner in appearance (shaved, fairly conservative hair), he chooses to play, what seems to be, on the look of a young, hip, radical intellectual who, while understanding the standards of ‘a professional appearance’, plays on these codes to foreground simultaneously his understanding and deliberate subversion. Moreover, his appearance provides energy within any setting, especially a drab conference room, and plays well when juxtaposed to his quiet voice and playful jokes.

The talk:

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The World Economic Forum is currently under way and there can be no better way of finding out the insider notes than from a blog written by reporters from NyTimes and the International Herald Tribune.

Of note, Kenneth Rogoff points to Angelina Jolie’s pregnancy as an economic solution to Europe’s need to be more competitive. Hmm…yea I can see that…

In a conversation today, I mentioned that I intended to transfer to another program. To the obvious next question (“where to?”), I responded that my preference by location would be UC Berkley but have no real sense of where the top work is being done in my field. I added that Ivy League programs, UPenn particularly because they have a specific track in Globalization Studies, despite their obvious benefits may also have a hyper competitive environment.

As an example, I pointed to one colleague’s experience at the University of Chicago. They found the professors there incredibly accommodating, a point made by my conversation partner, but the students there as both highly competitive and feigning ease with very difficult texts. My educational experience, both in academia and in martial arts, has been deeply influenced and helped by the presence of highly motivated cooperative students. Of course, I have experienced hostile environments, which, although work well to play on my already competitive nature, lead to more closeted less dialogic work.

The case often seems to be that fellow students have more to teach than do the professors leading the class. Of course, this is not to say that professors don’t play a vital, irreplaceable, role in academic apprenticeship, but rather that ideas, arguments and stances are crafted to a great deal amongst the apprentices themselves. I need only think of my officemates (Joel, Kristine, Sarah, Michael), who, during daily heated debates have helped me engage texts well before our official class meetings. They have also shown me that fervent disagreement is not evidence of dislike, something that my natural diplomacy refused to acknowledge. The direct consequence of these debates is a more productive class time and better use of the brilliant professors available to us; we spend less time in basic attempts to decipher complicated texts and more in engaging the stakes.

So, to answer the question I began with, “where to?” I offer the following criteria:

Top 5 program, a small collective of scholars working on globalization issues, sunny location, fantastic rigorous students, available/ open faculty, funding…

that’s not much to ask for…

p.s. brilliant beautiful single women (yes, plural) with a brown fetish would be a nice signing bonus….

is there such a thing as a bonus for a grad slave?

Kumarila claims that something that is called an “I” exists, established by the fact that an I is constantly present in thinking. Sankara, however, argues that this only shows that there is subjectivity —the presence of consciousness—not that there is an object named “I.” The apparent existence of an objective self is an illusion, created by the logic of the grammatical use of “I” in language.

Strange names, certainly. Strange thoughts? Anybody who has read philosophy in the west will not think so—provided that Kumarila (7th century) is replaced with Descartes (17th) and Sankara (8th) with Kant (18th). The point is not the polemical one about whether it was Indians or Europeans who had these thoughts first (the ancient Greeks and early Islamic thinkers are also in the running). The point is not that the Indians deserve study because they thought like Europeans. The point is simply that, for many reasons, the Indian thinkers are unknown to contemporary western philosophy, and are likely to remain so. The same is true of Chinese thinkers.

Prasad explores the yet unrealized possibilities of dialogue and mutual critique between Eastern and Western philosophic traditions. The subject is of personal interest, as demonstrated in my first Kierkegaard post, but also banished into that quiet corner reserved for the family’s dunce. Prasad brings the bastard child out of the closet, demonstrating that not a lack of intellectual rigor but a lack of nerve and institutionalized tradition keeps them separate.

An additional aim to the list provided in an earlier post: Don’t write overwrought sentences or extended metaphors that make you want to gag the author.

Before dawn on January 15th, an Israeli special forces unit killed a Palestinian mother and her 24-year-old son in their home. The mother had three bullets in her; the son 15. The Israeli soldiers also shot and wounded the woman’s husband and four other family members: young women were shot in the pelvis and chest, young men in the foot, chest, torso, liver. The firing lasted over an hour. Then the Israeli squad shot at an arriving ambulance and prevented it for 45 minutes from tending to the dying, bleeding family.

A must read from Lenin’s Tomb where he also links to another article on the event.

Two coffee filled days later, all texts are incomprehensible, my ability to focus is at a second grade level, and the readings just keep piling up. What now? Sleep; early, beautiful, deep sleep in bountiful amounts. A few notes before I give into my mind’s revolt.

Slide:

You may have noticed the addition of this nifty little plug-in to the blog. I realize it’s entirely superfluous but has an explicable appeal for me. Aside from sharing a few random images, there is also an element of “bling, bling” in it that simply delights my vanity.

as my mind screams at me, I (word)press on…

Writing:

I have announced my intentions to one person only but, as we all know, the secret was already out when I thought it. My tendency is to set very large long lasting goals, so I have tapered this down to a month: One blog post per day, at least, from now through the month of February.

There are two distinct reasons for doing this. Actually three, but one vanished. I began thinking about this initiative as a way to keep readers interested and coming back daily for their dose of Shashi. This reasoning, however, was quickly upstaged by the wonderful benefits such a discipline might yield. These benefits, in turn, became the real reasons for instituting this program.

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Kierkegaard: Abraham cannot speak because what he says cannot be understood, it is too grounded on the strength of the absurd.

Talk he cannot, he speaks no human language. Though he himself understood all the tongues of the world, though the loved ones understood them too – he still could not talk – he speaks a divine tongue – he ‘speaks with tongues.’

...he cannot say (i.e. in a way that can be understood).

Again, this is because Abraham is operating on the “strength of the absurd,” which is precisely what Kierkegaard regards as faith. Taking into account the discussion of St. Paul in my seminar today, we can not only say that he has faith, a direct aneconomic connection with God (Other), but that in a sense, Abraham is faith since this connection is not a willed property but a spontaneous event. Abraham cannot speak even when he speaks because what he says will be incomprehensible, at least to ground metaphysics.

The latter move, to locate speaking/ the speech act not only in the would be speaker but also her audience, is of particular interest to me and could function as a wonderfully insightful trope.

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Whatchyall know about some Plastic Man; the legendary innovator of Detroit Techno?

Yes, he was and is from Windsor, Canada; thanks.

What you see is the imaginative solution of two young men, namely my roommate and I, to the problem of customizing and personalizing our living space. I provided the idea, he the materials. The silver box is actually a dj crate that Craig uses to pack and transport his turntables. The Plastic Man logo is a record mat, the soft covering on the turntable, which he kept as a memento from earlier, more raucous, days.

Two nails, some sticky pads, and an untouched Northwest tag later (that red thing hanging down), we have a beautiful and unique installation for our record/ practice room; Detroit Style!

That should be the title of our HGTV makeover show: we Detroitify yu-a house!

Or as my wonderfully grounding but eccentric roommate would say:

...bless that shit like a hellified cherry…

Amen.

The host committee is tutoring thousands of volunteers to “say nice things about Detroit” when encountering visitors.

Another effort is trying to help the homeless leave the streets for shelters on Super Bowl Weekend. One shelter, the Detroit Rescue Mission, plans a three-day Super Bowl party with food and four big-screen television sets. Experts estimate that 3,000 or more homeless people are on the streets at any one time, with up to a total of 13,000 homeless people

Are you kidding me?? Say “nice things”? Hide the homeless?

Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens refers to those who are specifically dispatched to uphold the simulated reality as The People’s Will. These individuals are sent out to make claims that they know to be false in an effort to uphold a material reality that doesn’t exist. That, of course, is post-Soviet Russia and nothing that insidious would happen in our dear motor city.

Hiding the homeless, sweeping them under the mat, is one ridiculous example of what can be summed up as “liberalism not revolution.” Closing your eyes to Detroit’s decaying structures, both physical and economic, does not make them disappear. You are not playing peek-a-boo!

Here is the full NyTimes article; the link will work only for a week or so before it becomes archived.

I’m reading through Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and despite the many intellectually interesting points raised, I find his head bashing against a specifically Western conception of the divine, troubling. What follows are some rough thoughts regarding a mystic/esoteric conception of divinity and some possible ramifications for reading Abraham’s story.

The duty becomes duty to God by being referred to God, but I do not enter into relation with God in the duty itself. Thus it is a duty to love one’s neighbor; it is a duty in so far as it is referred to God; yet it is not God that I come in relation to in the duty but the neighbor that I love.

Most basic Western conceptions of God are based on a hard and fast distinction between the divine and human beings. Christ, of course, is an exception as God’s manifestation on Earth but is unexceptional in that he is used to sustain this human/divine divide, precisely by being the exception. After all, we cannot become Christ. Thus, we have Kierkegaard’s claim that performing the duty to love one’s neighbor only achieves duty to God through a mediation, a reference that does not put one in direct communion with the absolute, as Abraham achieves.

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Have you heard the new Zen koan?

When is a blog post not a post?
—Kamins-enz

deep…

Big ups to my students rocking the artifacts project!

For the full theory behind the project, here ye––here ye (two word summary: think Duchamp)

Check them out but don’t bite:

http://au3308.blogspot.com/

http://theschocker.blogspot.com/

http://av6555.blogspot.com/

http://www.coack.blogspot.com/

http://andgrn9.blogspot.com/

http://damagedplan.blogspot.com/

These are some really strong starts to what promises to be a creative and interesting class.

What’s up with dead MCs coming back to do more albums??

Blogsome was down for a few days; look for a burst of wisdom soon…

the glow reflected on your face is the manifestation of the transcendent knowledge you are recieving even as you read these words…so you got that goin for ya…

bitchin..

I’ve just started reading Victor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens, easily one of the funniest texts I’ve read, especially for a class. Here are some favorite excepts:

On a Che Guevera t-shirt with “Rage Against the Machine” inscribed on it:

...in the area of radical youth culture nothing sells as well as well-packaged and politically correct rebellion against a world that is ruled by political correctness and in which everything is packaged to be sold.

Every time you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning wakening with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don’t even have the instrument to do it, because our mind and the world are the same thing.

My personal favorite: The idea for an advertisement.

An elegant, rather effeminate Hamlet (general stylization – unisex) in black tights and a light blue tunic worn next to the skin, wanders slowly around a graveyard. Beside one of the graves he halts, bends down and picks up a pink skull out of the grass. Close-up: Hamlet knitting his brows slightly as he gazes at the skull. View from the rear: close-up of taut buttocks with the letters ‘CK’. New camera angle: skull, hand, letters ‘CK’ on the blue tunic. Next frame: Hamlet tosses the skull in to the air and kicks it. The skull soars upwards, then arcs back down and falls straight through the bronze wreath held by a bronze angel on one of the graves, just as though it were a basketball hoop. Slogan:

JUST BE. CALVIN KLEIN

I just found this record while browsing for A Huey P. Newton Story and am incredibly excited to hear it.

This is one of the most amazing performances I’ve ever seen. I acknowledge my limited experience with one-(wo)man performances but Robert Smith gives the legendary figure new flesh.

“knock em out Mos, knock em out the box Mos…”

Conversation in class turned toward the autonomous actions of soldiers in the theater of conflict, the moment of actualizing orders from above does not happen because there is always deviance in two forms; intentional subversion and in reaction to contingencies. Can the soldiers, at this moment, be considered a multitude? They are after all operating as autonomous agents in the theater of battle, looking after their own self preservation.

My reply makes necessary the addition of the temporal dimension. At what moment are these soldiers multitudinous? Certainly they are not operating as a multitude while in training under the command of drill sergeants, while being mobilized to any particular theater of war. Rather, they become the multitude, or operate multitudinously, at the moment of deployment into battle and faced with Real war. Even here, when the quest for self-preservation is dominant, there is always centripetal energy attempting to draw them back into the chain of command, of hierarchy.

I am thinking here of the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks is leaning against a metal barrier on the beach and experiences a lucid consciousness amidst the carnage of the D-Day landing. He is brought back by two soldiers screaming at him for orders on what to do next.

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the weight of immateriality forcing one to become a thinker..